


to those with broken hearts

by allapplesfall



Category: NCIS
Genre: Angst, Episode: s08e23 Swan Song, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Ziva David lost way too many people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 16:21:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7229800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allapplesfall/pseuds/allapplesfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the day Mike Franks dies, Ziva is tired.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to those with broken hearts

Ziva David has had a lot of bad days in her life. In fact, she can probably justify most of the days of her life as bad days. No one who knows her history would disagree.

But the day Mike Franks dies is high up there. Not as bad as the day Tali died, or Ari, or her mother, or her childhood best friend, or Jenny, or Michael even, but still awful. Not as bad as most of the days in Somalia, but at least there she was either fighting or ready to die. Not caught somewhere in between.

Because, God, on the day of Mike Franks’s death she’s so _tired_. It’s not the normal tired, no, but the tired that pulls at her bones and settles in her skin and makes her want to lie down and never stand up again. It’s the type of tired that chokes her without blocking any passages and presses on her chest to the point where she wouldn’t mind if her lungs just folded under the weight of it. It’s painful in a dull way.

“Better us than someone who didn’t sign up for it,” Tony says in the elevator, and Ziva feels her heart burn in her chest because she _didn’t_ sign up for it, not really. She was bred to protect by any means necessary, and she is crumbling inside from all the years of it.

The worst thing is, when she says it to Tony, “I don’t think I can take anymore,” it feels so raw and cold at the same time. Because _God_ , she doesn’t even know what she can’t take. Is it NCIS? Is it fighting an endless war, one she was drafted into before she could read? Is it losing people to death, because everyone around her dies? Is it surviving to the point where she doesn’t deserve it anymore?

She doesn’t know. But she knows that the day Mike Franks takes his final stand, she realizes just how exhausted she is.

She doesn’t go to his funeral. She’s only gone to one funeral, which she knows Tony would find ironic if she told him, given the number of people she knows who have died. Or maybe he wouldn’t find it funny; maybe he would just give her those sad eyes, like when he thinks he understands something she doesn’t. Either way, the only funeral she has ever attended was that of Jenny Shepard, and even then only because she promised. She promised in Cairo, between bullets and car chases, that she would attend Jenny’s funeral if she were to die first. In exchange, Jenny said she would return the favor, but it didn’t turn out that way.

Ziva has sat Shiva for a few people, mourned the way that her soul had guided her to. She cannot sit Shiva for Mike Franks. That is not the way he would have wanted to be honored, and she has to respect that, even in death.

A funeral, however, he wouldn’t have minded. But most funerals she has missed. Her father scheduled a training exercise for her during her mother’s, she was not invited to Aatif’s, she was too busy killing the men who had killed Tali to attend hers, there was no funeral for Ari, she could not bring herself to attend Roy’s, Michael did not deserve her attendance, and Mike… She just cannot. There is too much death. There has always been too much death for her. She thinks that maybe it clings to her, or nips at her heels like a disobedient attack dog. Or maybe she’s death itself, and that’s why no one ever stays.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she locks herself in her room and feels empty. Not angry, like after Tali, not sad, like after Aatif and Roy and her mother, not betrayed, like with Ari and Michael: just empty. She hates it.

A part of her wants to get furious. It wants to rage and break things, because everything is so damn _unfair_. Another part of her wants to sob into her pillow for all the things she has lost. She doesn’t have the energy to do either. She just lays on her bed and stares blankly at the ceiling.

It’s a bad day.


End file.
